Artificial Interruption
by Alexander Urbelis (alex@urbel.is)
Disconnection is Being
It's hard to say what color the walls are here. It may be the sort of hue of blue you're likely to find around Easter, or it could as easily be a shade of green depending on the slant of light or perhaps how the rods and cones of one's ocular circuitry are configured. The potential for disagreement about this shade reminds me of the viral, petty, and useless debate about the color of a wedding dress that was running rampant through all avenues of social media a few years back. I'm sitting on a small wooden chair that goes with a similarly wooden desk, both of which are a bit rickety and must be at least 80 years old. On this rickety desk is a light tan rotary phone, on the face of which there are instructions to dial 100 for the operator and 999 for emergency services. I'm in London, in Room 5 of the Chelsea Arts Club.
Two issues ago, I wrote about Vienna and the Proustian memories I had about the several chance meetings across Europe that I had with one girl when I was 19 years old, the thesis of which focused on a longing for experiencing the world as it is, not as it is interpreted or reviewed by others on our smart phones, but as a human being with a sense of wonder. That column, more than any other, struck a chord with the readers of this magazine. You wrote me about how you too feel that nostalgia and yearn for a sense of the unknown that comes with being off the grid; you wrote about how these chance and ephemeral encounters with other persons, fleeting as they are, can have an outsized and disproportionate impact on one's life. Since then, whether it be fate, luck, destiny, I have found myself lodging in the legendary Chelsea Arts Club, where this is only one rule, a very important rule, and one which everyone unconditionally and without exception respects: mobile phones are not permitted.
Directly related to this unique rule, there's relatively little on social media or the Internet at large about this place. You don't see anyone taking photos of their food or selfies with their friends, and no one "checks in" to the Chelsea Arts Club on Facebook. Juxtaposed to this alternate universe where social media does not exist has been news that:
- All social media platforms have been woefully insufficient at combating advanced threat actors' efforts to spread harmful disinformation on their networks and that these platforms are not being transparent about these efforts.
- The Surgeon General of the United States has warned that 13, the age at which most social media platforms permit children to create an account, is far too early and dangerous for children on account of the "skewed and often distorted environment" of these platforms that can impair a child's self-image.
- Twitter is revoking its longstanding policy of providing free API access to its data to researchers who, among other things, study disinformation, online discourse, and how that discourse affects political processes.
Mind you, these are all stories that broke independently of each other and within the last 24 hours. The common thread running amongst all, however, is clear: social media has become an opaque and unregulated cesspit of deceit and lies that can be harmful. Conversely, while I have been parked at the Club, I have felt the beneficial effects of removing myself from that sewer nearly immediately.
How I ended up a member of this esteemed artists' club is another story entirely - full of chance and mystery, possibly fodder for another column - but suffice it to say that I am humbled to be here and around a strangely high concentration of the world's greatest artists and thinkers. Listeners of Off The Hook who are also readers of this column will have noticed that I am frequently in London these days. What has taken me back to this lovely city so regularly is my lecture schedule: believe it or not, I'm now also a law professor at King's College London, lecturing about cybersecurity law. But critically, remarkably, and unexpectedly, that world of disconnection for which I longed two issues ago actually exists within the walls of this Club.
At first, however, this funny prohibition on the use of mobile phones presents a compliance problem. One of the first things I did on arrival was go to the bar and order a drink. Alone with a pint of warm beer, I found myself instinctively reaching into my pocket because I wanted to salve the feeling of loneliness with the blue light of my phone. It took conscious thought and physical effort to keep the phone out of my hands. What ensued when the phone stayed in my pocket was hilarious and could result only from human interaction.
Without my phone to entertain me, I had to speak to other humans. It was like setting your clock back to 1994. The bartender and I had an incredible initial conversation, and she was very shocked to learn that I was a lawyer, not an artist. Professional types were few and far between and rarely admitted. The bartender said, "Well, if anybody questions you, you could always say you're a collector." A few minutes later, two young men in suits sidled up to the bar next to me and started chatting to me. They informed me that they were guests at the Club and one asked if I was a member, to which I answered affirmatively. The other then asked what I did in the arts. Before I could respond, the bartender responded for me. "He's a collector," she quipped. The next question was perhaps inevitable. One of them asked, "What do you collect?" To keep this ruse going, one needed a decisive answer without any mental hesitation or equivocation. "Ashtrays," I said.
Fascinated by this response, these two young men in suits began to quiz me on why and what sort of ashtrays I collected. It was a real challenge to nimbly and confidently explain why one has a collection of ashtrays from the 19th century and beyond. Relying on my background in philosophy, I explained that I was an adherent to the notion of aesthetics that the ancient Greeks had espoused, namely that objects that served their purpose well were considered to have intrinsic beauty, and that ashtrays were a perfect and modern representation of the timeless principle of beauty being beholden to form. Hearing this utter bullshit, the bartender had to turn around to laugh. And every time I tried to veer the subject away from ashtrays, these two gentlemen could not satiate their curiosity and would come right back to it.
Admittedly, this was a bit of fun, but also duplicitous. What was extraordinary, though, was that sense of the unknown. Because of the prohibition of mobile phones, no one could verify whether I was in fact an ashtray collector or not, nor would I have been permitted to display my favorite or most valuable ashtrays to these gentlemen. Information came from conversation and connection between human beings, not from a device and a search engine.
The breakfast table, however, is truly an extraordinary place. In the dining room, there is a long and wide wooden table, the head of which faces a large window that looks out to the garden. At the other end of the table are all of the newspapers of the day, The Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times, etc. Everyone joins the table as strangers and leaves as friends.
"Good morning," is what everyone who enters the room says before sitting down. That should not seem so strange, but in this age of phone addiction it is. Can you imagine a stranger entering a dining area in a busy hotel full of professionals on their phones tapping away, blurting out "Good morning," and then sitting down next to an unknown entity with the full and certain expectation of conversation? No, you cannot. "Good morning," said in earnest, is a rare commodity.
It was at this very breakfast table that I met the acclaimed Scottish architectural photographer, James Reid. We started chatting about coffee, then coffee mugs, then about how David Lynch portrayed coffee mugs in Twin Peaks, and somehow from there we landed on his recent photo shoots of data centers across the United Kingdom, and then onto the topic of how social media has selfishly failed us and significantly harmed society and individuals in so many seemingly irreparable ways. We spoke specifically about the anecdote where I wrote in this column (38:3) about my train ride from Annapolis to New York that started with a conflict and ended with a reconciliation that would not have happened in any online forum. James offered a perspective that I hadn't thought about before, that such a reconciliation was only possible because of the physical proximity to the being with whom I was in conflict.
Instead of tapping out emails and rushing to the office, we sat and talked for another hour. You could feel the sparks of light generated by two persons from different trades offering their varied perspectives. There were no mobile phones or screens anywhere to take us out of that time and space, to distract us with attention-grabbing polemics or jealous of our neighbor's latest Instagram nonsense. The color of the wedding dress, or of the walls, was neither debated nor did it matter. Through something as simple as conversation unfettered by remote distractions, we forged a lasting friendship and kinship - we not only recaptured that sense and beauty of the fleeting moment but, through technological disconnection, reclaimed, even if for a short while, the ability to experience life and its moments not as a data set but as a human being.